Football

Football Collects Three ESPN Academic All-America Awards

Nov 23, 2010

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – For the third time in program history and first time since 1997, MIT placed three athletes on the ESPN Academic All-America Football Team. Brian Doyle, a Second-Team pick last year, earned a spot on the First Team and was joined by classmate Will Vega-Brown while Patrick Jupe represented the Engineers on the Second Team. The accolades raised the football program's total to an Institute-best 32 awards and maintains MIT's position as the all-time NCAA Division III leader with 169 honors since 1980.

Doyle was the Engineers' top punt and kick returner and was a member of a defense that ranks seventh nationally in pass defense and stands fifth in the New England Football Conference (NEFC) Boyd Division in opponent first downs. A candidate for a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering with a concentration in Economics, he is a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society and the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. Doyle completed a pair of internships with Bose Corporation during the summers of 2008 and 2010. Throughout his two stints, he analyzed suspension system performance, simulated force analysis of car suspension systems on various roads, and studied undesirable speaker noise resulting from geometry. He worked with an Electrical Engineer to establish an equivalent resistance amplifier testing method and partnered with a Mechanical Engineer to evaluate material strength and thermal behavior. Doyle was a research assistant for Professor Thomas Peacock from MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering where he helped a graduate student with internal waves research and also conducted experiments on boundary-layer flows driven up a heated slope in a fluid.

As a member of MIT's offensive line, Vega-Brown helped the Cardinal and Gray rank third in the Boyd Division in sacks against, third in pass offense, and sixth in rush offense. Majoring in Mechanical Engineering and Physics, he is a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society and the Pi Tau Sigma Mechanical Engineering Honor Society. Vega-Brown was a recipient of an award for outstanding service to the MIT Mechanical Engineering Department and also earned accolades in a robotics class for his work in pathfinding and mapping. During his internship with Vecna Robotics, he spent a majority of his time working on control software for various robots. Vega-Brown previously held an internship in Professor Anuradha Annaswamy's mechanical engineering lab, working on adaptive control systems.

Jupe's 99 tackles put him second in the NEFC and first among linemen; in addition he posted the fifth-highest tally in the program's history. A Mechanical Engineering major, he is a contributor to the MIT Electric Vehicle Team where he helped design and fabricate batteries, charging systems, electric drive-trains, and software for rapid-recharging electric vehicles. The team's research into rapid recharge systems has attracted attention from BMW, Tesla, Ford, and the U.S. Department of Transportation. In a UROP with the Mechanical and Materials Engineering Departments, Jupe was charged with finding commercial and demonstrable ways to use carbon fiber nano-tubes, which once spun together in a certain way, have extremely high energy-storage spring properties. He focused his research on using the nano-tubes to store energy in order to power wristwatches. A participant in MIT's D-Lab Development Technology group, Jupe is designing cleaner burning stoves and fuels for third-world and developing countries to help reduce deaths caused by smoke inhalation as a result of cooking fires.